One thing I cannot grok is the non-stop honoring of the troops and cheering for the next brilliant war, ah yes war is great, let’s sing bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran, Saddam and Quadaffi got what was coming to them, also have you heard antifa is violent?

@sign Historically it's a result of a time when we legitimately needed national unity to mobilize the entire economy for WWII. Honoring the troops became a way to bring people together and help them make sacrifices such as less meat, less rubber, etc.

Unfortunately we also figured out it's a great way to indefinitely support Empire and colonialism. I think people also feel pretty guilty about how troops were treated when they came home from Nam and are overcompensating.

And we didn’t need to mobilize the entire country for war. That was only necessary to win two separate, unrelated wars on two fronts simultaneously. The war in the Pacific was a war of USA imperialism, period.

@sign I didnt say imperialism began in 1945. I'm saying we found a useful tool to support it.

And entering WWII was a response to aggression. I'm not gonna deny the US found ways to colonialize, but responding to an attack is a valid reason to enter war and, like it or not, war with Japan meant war with Germany, who had the largest military industrial complex the world had ever seen at that point in time.

@sandrockcstm I’m sorry but you seem to have been mislead about history. The USA embargoed Japan’s oil and was circling Japan with warships and submarines for months literally starving them before Pearl Harbor. The war in the Pacific was raw imperialism from start to finish.

@sign I wasn't asking for you to do all my studying, only to do what's polite and provide one link to support your one claim.

I appreciate you expanding my view on the oil embargo. That's important history to know.

Still, I don't see how this changes my original point and makes me confused as to why this conversation got so contentious. Germany and Japan were allied, therefore war with one meant war with the other. A mobilized economy was inevitable unless we stayed out.

@sandrockcstm Germany and Japan were in opposite hemispheres... Japan became easy allies with Germany because Germany needed Japan to distract the Russians and Japan was desperate for any help they could get since the USA was literally starving them to death...

@sign I mean, is your point that I'm just not being woke enough on US colonization?

Because I answered your original question pretty convincingly, I think. Now it feels like I'm being flexed on for not knowing the full extent of how awful the US was even though I've said from the get-go that America is an empire and a colonizer.